2013-03-22T21:30:30ZFluxBBhttps://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=160122Well, pacman -Qi shows a "Licences" field. There are those desc files (one per package) in /var/lib/pacman/local, you could work some script magic (probably one line of grep) to filter all non-free licences.

There is no direct way of configuring pacman to not install non-free packages. You should check every new package with pacman -Si to see, if the licence suits your taste. You should generally check every ne package with -Si and learn a bit more about it, so there is no extra effort.

* Is there a way to find out whether any non-free/proprietary software has been installed via pacman?

* Can I configure pacman to only install free (as in speech) software?

Rationale:

I'm one of those idealists trying to avoid non-free software. I believethat not buing hardware that requires proprietary code puts pressure onthe manufacturers to produce open products, accessible to free software.

With Debian this was pretty easy. Of course there were places(firmware, bios) with non-free code working in them, but I never had toinstall proprietary drivers on, or add proprietary blobs to any of myolder machines running Debian. Right now I'm trying ArchLinux for thefirst time, on a brand new machine, and of course I don't want to dropthis practice.

According to the ArchLinux FAQ [1], you guys seem to bee less concernedabout strictly using non-free software only. Well, ok. But I'm hopingto find a way to sort out which software gets installed here, i.e., toban the non-free stuff from my hardware.